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Herman Melville

Herman Melville

  • In his ninth and final novel, cultural observer, novelist, and poet Herman Melville gives us a picture of everything wrong with America in the decade preceding the Civil War.

    Evoking Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, this is a story of interlocking tales from a group of steamboat passengers traveling down the Mississippi toward New Orleans. Aboard the Fidèle can be found all manner of con man, from those selling stock in failing companies and herbal cure-all “medicines” to those who are raising money for a supposed charitable organization and those who simply ask for money outright. One man sneaks aboard ship to test the so-called confidence of the passengers, and everyone is forced to confront that in which he places his trust before journey’s end.

    Mixing his trademark satirical style with allegory and metaphysical treatise, Melville’s The Confidence-Man is a precursor to the twentieth-century literary preoccupations with nihilism, existentialism, and absurdism.

  • Pierre Glendinning is the nineteen-year-old heir to the manor at Saddle Meadows in upstate New York. Engaged to the blonde Lucy Tartan in a match approved by his domineering mother, Pierre encounters the dark and mysterious Isabel Banford, who claims to be his half-sister, the illegitimate and orphaned child of his father and a European refugee. Driven by his magnetic attraction to Isabel, Pierre devises a remarkable scheme to preserve his father’s name, spare his mother’s grief, and give Isabel her proper share of the estate.

    First published in 1852, Pierre was condemned by critics of the time: “a dead failure,” “this crazy rigmarole,” and “a literary mare’s nest.” Latter-day critics, however, have recognized in the story of Melville’s idealistic young hero a corrosive satire of the sentimental gothic novel and a revolutionary foray into modernist literary techniques.

  • Herman Melville’s tale of corporate discontent, Bartleby, the Scrivener, tells the story of a quiet, hardworking legal copyist who works in an office in the Wall Street area of New York City. The business where he works handles the official financial paperwork of wealthy men. One day, Bartleby’s employer requests he proofread one of the documents he has copied. Bartleby declines the assignment with the inscrutable “I would prefer not,” the first of what will become many refusals. The utterance of this remark sets off a confounding set of actions and behavior, making the unsettling character of Bartleby one of Melville’s most enigmatic and unforgettable creations.

  • A great new collection of classic short fiction, brilliantly read by a selection of narrators

    This recording includes the following stories:

    • “The Lightening-Rod Man” by Herman Melville

    • “One of the Missing” by Ambrose Bierce

    • “The Leopard Man’s Story” by Jack London

    • “Tennessee’s Partner” by Bret Harte

    • “The New Catacomb” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

    • “A Pair of Silk Stockings” by Kate Chopin

    • “My Watch” and “The Widow’s Protest” by Mark Twain

    • “An Ideal Family” by Kate Mansfield

    • “A Painful Case” by James Joyce

    • “Small Fry” by Anton Chekhov

    • “The Road from Colonus” by E. M. Forster

    • “Silhouettes” by Jerome K Jerome

    • “The Voice of the City” by O. Henry

    • “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

    • “The Diamond Mine” by Willa Cather

    • “The Man with the Golden Brain” by Alphonse Daudet

    • “Morella” by Edgar Allan Poe

    • “The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant

    • “The Portrait” by Edith Wharton

    • “The Philosopher in the Apple Orchard” by Anthony Hope

    • “Monkey Nuts” by D. H. Lawrence

  • Billy Budd, an orphaned, illegitimate child suffused with innocence, openness, and natural charisma, has been impressed into service aboard the HMS Bellipotent. He is adored by the crew but for unexplained reasons arouses the antagonism of the ship’s master-at-arms, John Claggart, who falsely accuses Billy of conspiracy to mutiny. Set in 1797, Billy Budd exploits the tension of this period during the war between England and France to create a tale of satanic treachery, tragedy, and great pathos that explores human relationships and the inherently ambiguous nature of man-made justice.

    Melville’s stories are masterpieces to be appreciated on more than one level. They are rich with symbolism and spiritual depth and show the timeless poetic power of Melville’s writing as he consciously uses the disguise of allegory in various ways and to various ends.

  • With its intense mix of mystery, adventure, and a surprise ending, Benito Cereno at first seems merely a provocative example from the genre Herman Melville created with his early bestselling novels of the sea. However, most Melville scholars consider it his most sophisticated work, and many, such as novelist Ralph Ellison, have hailed it as the most piercing look at slavery in all of American literature.

    Based on a real life incident—the character names remain unchanged—Benito Cereno tells what happens when an American merchant ship comes upon a mysterious Spanish ship where the nearly all-black crew and their white captain are starving and yet remain hostile to offers of help. Melville’s most focused political work, it is rife with allusions (a ship named after Santo Domingo, site of the slave revolt led by Toussaint L’Ouverture), analogies (does the good-hearted yet obtuse American captain refer to the American character itself?), and mirroring images that deepen our reflections on human oppression and its resultant depravities.

    It is, in short, a multilayered masterpiece that rewards repeated readings and deepens our appreciation of Melville’s genius.

  • One of the great works of American literature, Moby-Dick is the epic tale of one man’s fight against a force of nature.

    The outcast youth Ishmael, succumbing to wanderlust during a dreary New England autumn, signs up for passage aboard a whaling ship. The Pequod sails under the command of the one-legged Captain Ahab, who has set himself on a maniacal quest to capture the cunning white whale that robbed him of his leg: Moby-Dick.

    Capturing life on the sea with robust realism, Melville details the adventures of the colorful crew aboard the ship as Ahab pursues his crusade of revenge, heedless of all cost. This masterfully symbolic drama of the conflict between man and his fate has a special intensity that listeners will not soon forget.